The Rt. Rev. Brian W. Keith is Executive Bishop of the General
Church, General Pastor of the General Church, Chancellor of
the Academy of the New Church, and President of the General
Church in Canada, the General Church in South Africa and of
the General Church International, Incorporated. He lives with
his wife, Gretchen (Umberger), in Bryn Athyn.
Contact: [email protected]
O U R N E W C H U RC H V O C A B U L A R Y
Part of a continuing series developed by the Rev. W. Cairns Henderson, 1961-1966.
DEGREES
The doctrine of degrees is peculiar to the Writings and fundamental to an understanding
of their philosophy. The gradations from light to shade, fine to gross, rare to dense, loud to
quiet, etc., are continuous degrees, which are degrees of one thing – measurable by various
types of instrumentation. Discrete degrees are the degrees of the formation or composition
of one thing from another. They exist in all things, but each distinctly, although they make a
one when taken together. They are related as end, cause and effect, and the only ratio between
them is that of correspondence; that is, the higher degrees can flow into the lower ones, but
not the lower into the higher.
Lower degrees have qualities not found in higher ones, but these are qualities of
limitation. Love, thought and speech are a series of discrete degrees. Thought cannot
formulate all that love perceives, and speech cannot express all that man thinks. However,
discrete degrees are homogeneous, and it is in the ultimate degree that all the power of a series
is exerted. The three heavens and the three degrees of the mind are discrete series.
Yet it should be noted that there are discrete degrees in natural as well as in spiritual
things; that the term does not express only a relation between the spiritual and the natural
or the infinite and the finite. The natural atmospheres, for example, are discrete from one
another. The designations “degrees of height” and “degrees of length” should not be taken too
literally. (See Arcana Coelestia 10,181; Heaven and Hell 38; The Infinite 16; Divine Love and
Wisdom 184, 256; Divine Providence 32.)
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